> The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. As this kind of person, it can be alienating in some teams / companies. What I've found works best is to convey how the added complexity will affect non-engineers. You have to understand the incentives and trade offs though, and sometimes it's better to take the loss. If you have the fortune of sticking around with the same leaders for awhile, a few rounds of being vocal, but…
My experience with avoiders and reducers and recyclers is that they want to avoid _my_ idea and do _their_ idea instead.
Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
171–180 of 361 posts
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#172Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…
By complete coincidence, yesterday I came across this link to an article Peter Naur wrote in 1985 ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf ) which I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I've been doing this for coming up on thirty years now, mostly at one large company, and I spent a significant number of hours every week fielding questions from people who are newer at it who are having trouble with one thing…
Everyone should subscribe to the Future of Coding (recently renamed to the Feeling of Computing) podcast if you haven't already: https://feelingof.com/
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#173FWIW though the idea about a "speed" product and a "stability" product isn't new. We used to call it "prototyping". I don't know when/how that disappeared from the collective consciousness. "have a space where we can build things fast with horrible practices" isn't some AI era innovation, it's what smart companies have done for decades.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#174Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…
I'd love to talk more live. I think I have some ideas you'd be interested in. Find me in my profile.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#175As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#176Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…
Agree about expertise being inseparable from the 'world model'. When someone tells us something, they're assuming that we know a certain amount of background knowledge but, in reality, we never have exactly the missing pieces that the speaker is assuming we have because our world model is different. It can lead to distortions and misunderstandings.
Even if someone repeats back to us variants of what we've told them at a later time, it doesn't mean that they've internalized the exact same knowledge. The interpretation can be different in subtle and surprising ways. You only figure out discrepancies once you have a thorough debate. But unfortunately, a lot of our society is built around avoiding confrontation, there is a lot of self-censorship, so actually people tend to maintain very different world models even though the surface-level ideas which they communicate appear to be similar.
Individuals in modern society have almost complete consensus over certain ideas which we communicate and highly divergent views concerning just about everything else which we don't talk about... And as our views diverge more, it narrows down the set of topics which can be discussed openly.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#177The message that hits for me is that of AI being a destabilizer while simultaneously being an accelerator. The Speed/Scale suggestion won't address this. A codebase no one understands, growing at machine speed won't go away just because you drew a box around it. The fix is likely more mundane stuff like process and role shifts, smaller PRs, tests, tooling, ownership principles.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#178An AI agent using a web browser like a human. I used various stealth technologies to achieve this. I set it off on a research task for me and it saved me $30 of a purchase by finding the best price. Its Jeff Bezos worst nightmare, visting amazon.com and ignoring all the product placement ads.
It had multiple tabs open, did searches in multiple places, opening products and checking sites....it looked just like a human would do doing the same task.
This I can assure you would not have been possible without my expertise. I had to be very careful to remove all bot signals from the browser, including going to browserscan.net to check. Once done, most captchas were never shown to the agent. There is a NodeJS codebase involved that I wrote by hand.
I searched through the code of the browser automation framework I was using, looking for ways to make it look more human. I had AI help with this part, but had to confirm everything and pull the agent up when it suggested bad ideas.
Most of the work was architectural, including making sure my browser was easy for the agent to use.
I'm going to add 2captcha as a next step, to solve the few captchas that it still encounters (as I still do sometimes as a human).
I'm thinking of open sourcing it, but i'm not sure if its a good idea as if it became widespread, it might encourage the adoption of even more invasive anti-bot measures.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
By complete coincidence, yesterday I came across this link to an article Peter Naur wrote in 1985 ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf ) which I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I've been doing this for coming up on thirty years now, mostly at one large company, and I spent a significant number of hours every week fielding questions from people who are newer at it who are having trouble with one thing…
Obligatory link to a great podcast that has a great episode covering this paper: https://pca.st/episode/dfc024c8-31f8-4387-b301-7a4f77132b74 Everyone should subscribe to the Future of Coding (recently renamed to the Feeling of Computing) podcast if you haven't already: https://feelingof.com/
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#180As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…
This do not mean we don't develop new product and services, it just means when we do so, we find the path of least overall entropy, it also applies to operations and tech debt reduction.
premature optimization is root of all evil